Providence Health System pioneers healthcare digital innovation by involving patients and providers in their incubator model. They understand the challenges faced by healthcare systems and have successfully launched tailored digital tools, such as Praia Health. Praia Health takes a revolutionary digital flywheel approach to provide a seamless patient experience, leveraging personalization and data integration. Providence’s unique perspective as a healthcare provider ensures their solutions address real industry pain points, setting them apart in the evolving healthcare technology landscape.
Providence, a trailblazer in the realm of digital innovation, distinguishes itself by harnessing the insights of both patients and healthcare providers.
With a robust presence spanning the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, New Mexico, Nevada, and Texas, Providence Health System boasts an intimate understanding of the challenges that healthcare institutions face. The healthcare landscape is currently riddled with formidable obstacles, such as workforce shortages and the ever-evolving macroeconomic environment, especially in light of the tumultuous past two years. Nevertheless, Providence remains optimistic.
Sara Vaezy, Providence’s Chief Strategy and Digital Officer, emphasizes that while healthcare has witnessed digital innovation, many initiatives have faltered due to a lack of direction from the providers themselves. These providers possess firsthand knowledge of the industry’s pain points, yet a disconnect often exists between their needs and available solutions.
Providence addresses this divide through its Digital Innovation Group, an incubator model dedicated to crafting digital tools tailored explicitly for healthcare systems. Launched nearly a decade ago, the Digital Innovation Group has successfully introduced three tools addressing issues ranging from digital ordering and analytics to women’s health. Most recently, they launched Praia Health, a groundbreaking approach to enhancing the consumer experience in healthcare.
The Genesis of Praia Health
Providence’s paramount challenge lay in mitigating the friction encountered by consumers and patients, inspiring the creation of Praia Health.
In the healthcare consumer space, a plethora of digital solutions exist, encompassing online appointment scheduling systems, virtual patient intake procedures, and digital bill payment methods. However, navigating this digital patient experience can be cumbersome, particularly when patient portals are involved. These portals often lack user-friendliness and fail to seamlessly integrate various consumer-facing technologies.
Using any of these technologies can leave patients feeling disconnected and dissatisfied. A 2022 poll found that 61 percent of individuals found online appointment scheduling systems too complicated, discouraging them from seeking care. Another 2021 survey revealed that patients preferred dealing with the notorious Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) bureaucracy over the complexities of patient financial responsibilities.
Such friction poses a threat to healthcare organizations aiming to maintain strong relationships with consumers, ensuring both tight care coordination and steady revenue.
Providence’s vision was to create an all-encompassing digital patient experience that fosters patient engagement and loyalty. This is the epitome of consumer-facing healthcare technology, and Providence leveraged its unique perspective as a healthcare provider, rather than a technology firm, to bring Praia Health to fruition.
Praia Health’s Digital Flywheel Approach
Praia Health adopts a digital flywheel approach, a technology mechanism that continuously engages users and forges lasting relationships while encouraging them to utilize an entity’s services.
Vaezy likens this approach to the Starbucks experience, where customers can load money onto their app through pre-paid gift cards. Starbucks personalizes the app based on customer preferences, remembering birthdays and offering free drinks and other perks. Similarly, in healthcare, the flywheel revolves around understanding users’ health-related needs, intentions, motivations, preferences, and the services offered by the healthcare system, both within and beyond its walls. This contextually relevant experience sets Praia apart, providing more than just a means to make an appointment.
Praia achieves this high level of personalization through four key elements. First, it focuses on identity and profile, allowing users to access services through single sign-on and synchronizing their information with a clinical record. Users can also connect their relationships with other healthcare brands. Second, Praia builds a personalized experience based on user identity information, ensuring relevance to each unique user. Third, the technology integrates various healthcare and well-being aspects into one ecosystem. Finally, provider end-users can access data and analytics to understand how patients engage with the tool.
Leveraging Providence’s Industry Expertise
Over its nine-year history, the Providence Digital Innovation Group has consistently hit its mark. While it may not have taken numerous shots, this is primarily because of a deep commitment to addressing healthcare’s most pressing issues.
This group’s success stems from its core identity as a provider, allowing it to develop technology solutions that intimately understand the pain points of patients, communities, and the healthcare system itself. This insider perspective is invaluable, given the complexity of health systems and the challenges in obtaining the necessary data and feedback.
Furthermore, the prevalence of legacy systems in healthcare organizations poses a unique challenge. Providence’s Digital Innovation Group is uniquely positioned to navigate this complexity, as it operates within the same technological sandbox. Combining this legacy knowledge with modern technologists creates a potent force for solving healthcare challenges.
These tools are informed by those who will ultimately use them, making them more effective in reimagining workflows and enhancing the patient experience. As the healthcare industry embraces technology solutions, Providence stands at the forefront, demonstrating the power of a provider-driven approach to innovation.